Archive for June, 2008

I used to have about four different lists of favorite bookmarks: two on my work computer (one set for each Web browser, Internet Explorer and Firefox) and two on my personal computer (one for each Web browser).

That all changed a couple of years ago when I found out about del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a free Web-based bookmark tool…and much more! It is one place you can go from any browser, from any computer, to get to your own favorites. It also allows you to see other user’s bookmarks and tag them as your own. By assigning tags (a.k.a. keywords), you can organize your favorite pages in different ways (see picture below).

And, once you have convinced your friends and colleagues to sign up for del.icio.us, you can forward your bookmarks to them.

Are you convinced? If so, go to the Get Started page…and get organized! Then, tell us what you think by leaving a comment on this post. Happy organizing!

We are happy to announce that the online access problems with the Journal of the American Medical Association have been resolved and access has been restored. We appreciate your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please email us at biomed-ref@library.ucla.edu.

The UCLA Library is currently experiencing online access problems with the Journal of the American Medical Association. Staff are working on the problem and hope to resume full access as soon as possible. We will post to the blog when the problem is corrected. In the meantime, print copies of JAMA are available in the Biomedical Library, call number W1 AM554. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

On June 17, 2008 the Joint Commission announced the 2009 National Patient Safety Goals and related requirements for each of its accreditation programs and its Disease-Specific Care Certification Program. The National Patient Safety Goals promote specific improvements in patient safety by providing health care organizations with proven solutions to persistent patient safety problems. These Goals apply to the more than 15,000 Joint Commission-accredited and -certified health care organizations and programs. Click here to read the remainder of the news release.

Zotero is a web browser plugin that saves citation information from web pages and formats bibliographies. Zotero is free, open source, and only available for the Firefox browser. The newest version of Zotero was released on June 17, 2008, and is fully compatible with Firefox 3.

Zotero combines elements from other software programs to create a powerful tool for managing and using information. Running inside your web browser window as you surf the web, Zotero automatically senses the type of material you are viewing (e.g., Library Catalog records, article PDFs, book PDFs, newspaper articles, films, web pages, etc.) and displays an icon relating to the type of material in the web browser address bar. Click the icon and the complete bibliographic citation information for this item is added to your Zotero collection. The screenshot below displays a Zotero collection of books, a newspaper article, and a journal article.

You can create multiple collections and include items in more than one collection simultaneously. Once you have added an item to a collection, you can tag it with keyword(s) that describe its meaning. Use the tag panel (show below) to view and search all tags in your collections.

In addition to storing information, Zotero lets you interact with your collected items. You can add notes to individual items, link notes between multiple items, or write notes about entire collections. If you capture a web page, you can add annotations to the page. This screenshot shows 2 notes and a screenshot attached to the citation for a journal article by Hillyer et al.

Use Zotero to create bibliographies with Microsoft Word, Open Office, or Google Docs. Multiple styles are supported, including American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychological Association (APA), National Library of Medicine, Nature journals, Cell journals, and Council of Biology Editors (CBE). New styles are added frequently.

For the first time ever, the BruinGo Flash Pass program will be available through summer quarter 2008. Show your BruinCard and the Flash Pass and ride the Big Blue Bus (Santa Monica Transit) or Culver CityBus for free all summer long. Read more about eligibility and purchase methods for the Pass on the BruinGo Transit Program web page. Hurry, because you must purchase your pass prior to July 25th!

Learn about tools you can use to organize your academic work this summer on the Biomedical Library blog. Between June 16 and July 21, you can read articles about software to help you manage PDFs and citations, the advantages of setting up accounts at Library-provided resources, how to incorporate RSS feeds, tables of content alerts, and other special features into your daily work, and social bookmarking and networking tools.

This post will focus on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook is a free website that is very popular on college campuses. (Many UCLA Library employees have Facebook profiles!) You might be most familiar with Facebook as a place to connect with friends or play games, but many in the academic world are also using Facebook to connect with colleagues and conduct scholarly work.

One popular way to use Facebook is to form or join groups. You can use groups to meet and network with colleagues.

You can also add applications to your Facebook profile to help you search for and locate information, like the UCLA Library Catalog or PubMed.

Facebook can be great place to conduct discussions, meet and keep up connections with far-flung colleagues, and locate important information. Leave a comment to tell us how you’re using Facebook to support your academic work!

For over 70 years, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has been promoting research, disseminating results and providing training in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Cancer.gov, the NCI Web site, is an informative resource for this work. Bringing up to date information about drugs used to treat cancer, clinical trials and research funding opportunities, this site also includes authoritative, easily understandable patient education materials for various types of cancers and the PDQ (Physician’s Data Query) NCI’s comprehensive database of peer-reviewed summaries of the cancer literature. Much of the Cancer.gov content is also available in Spanish.

The Biomedical Library wants to hear from you! Through July 11th, 2008, the Biomedical Library will be conducting a survey regarding our print services. The results of this survey will help guide the decision-making about future printing services. The survey is available online or you can fill out a paper form at any of the following locations in the Biomedical Library:

Circulation Desk

Print station 1 or 2 on the first floor

Print station 1 in the TLC

Bruincard machine on the first floor

Your feedback is very important to us and we appreciate your assistance!

The Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library has print and online resources to help you prepare for the USMLE Steps 1-3. To find books available in the library, search the UCLA Library Catalog using the keywords “examination questions” plus a subject (e.g., biochemistry). Access Medicine has textbooks and several of the Lange Review series books available anytime from anywhere. Access Medicine also contains a version of the Lange Self-Assessment Tool, also know as USMLEasy.com, containing over 3,500 USMLE-formatted questions (you must create a free personalized account in order to take advantage of this feature). Question answers also include explanations referencing online texts for further reading.

If you’re off-campus, don’t forget to set up the UCLA proxy or VPN to access resources from anywhere.